Richard said slowly: “It’s such a beastly position for all of them—all of us,” he amended; but it still seemed a grotesque nightmare that he should be one of the band whom he was unwillingly compelled to understand and defend.
“It’s all very well to be down on your pater, Redbury, and of course one rags about the change of names, and Swiss waiters and so on—but it’s so utterly unnatural to have no country when your country is the one thing in all the world that matters. As good patriots as any are drifting about loose with nowhere to dump their load of patriotism. Oh, I know the stock argument—they should have stuck to the place where they were born. Well, a few thousands, a few tens of thousands haven’t done so; it’s no good pretending that it was as important before nineteen-fourteen as now.”
“I suppose the English didn’t overflow and get stranded on No Man’s Land in such numbers, because they could always colonize,” David conjectured.
“And now this war; we scramble for cover. And the safe people who have settled for generations in one place, of one country, of unmixed blood, laugh at us for scuttling. Do they ever think how easy it is—no merit, but, God! how easy, to be born in England, wholly English, when they say of the half and half brigade: ‘Let ’em get back to their own country—we don’t want ’em!’? But they might have said that before 1914, to have given them a chance to get back. They can’t get back now. Their own so-called country doesn’t want ’em either.... Won’t have them; calls them renegades, who have severed all ties, all obligations. And there they are, absolutely helpless between the two. Belonging to both—no—belonging to neither. Can claim protection from neither. They’re frightened, I tell you, David. All this frantic jabber of the Hidden Hand—why, there have been practically no cases where the naturalized German has been proved guilty of plotting against England in the interests of the Hun. One or two, perhaps, among thousands. But rejected by Germany, rejected by England, dashed from one to the other—how can they help all those little acts that revolt you as being ridiculous or—what do you call it? undignified—ostentatiously planking down their names on subscription lists, kow-towing to the English servants, change of name, and pretending to be Dutch, and pitiful swanking of their English friends; even grabbing at Samson Phillips to get him in the family at all costs.—All that isn’t treachery, but ordinary childish human funk.”
“Why, at the worst, what can be done to them?”
“Nothing very bad. Nothing at all compared with what the men at the Front have to go through; think I don’t know that?” Richard questioned fiercely. “And yet they wouldn’t be funking if they belonged to a country, and had a united cause to fight for. It’s not being able to shout with the rest. It’s the bitter desolation, nowadays, of fighting for one’s own hand....”
He became aware of David’s slow quizzical smile.
“The miracle of the Sleeping Beauty awakened,” he commented softly. “If nothing else, the Great War has at least done this for one Richard Marcus. Rather a drastic kiss, but astoundingly effective.”
“Shut up!” Richard kicked at a stone in the roadway. Head bent, hands clenched in his pockets—as if he wanted to think. As if he welcomed this disconcerting upheaval of his imagination ... to be able to understand Otto Redbury—what next? To stick up for a lot of rotten Germans—Marcus of Winborough, champion half-back of the footer team—Greville Dunne’s pal—average at his work, but a decent ordinary all-round fellow, and no end keen on a commission in the R.F.C. Never again, for him. Never again. Something had happened.... Richard walked along savagely mourning for the self that had once fitted him so easily.... Never again!
David noticed his dejection—and amusement softened into something resembling tenderness for this strong bull-necked fellow, helpless in the grip of his first individual problem. It must have been a bad shock so to have galvanized him from matter-of-course unthinking acceptance of a scheme of life which had been hitherto fair enough and good enough ... tread of many feet all marching in the same direction ... and now—No Man’s Land.